Our mission is to inspire and empower a community of students to explore and put into practice the principles of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

STRIVE

We believe philosophy serves a crucial need in each person’s life: the need for an integrated, consistent view of the world, in order to think with clarity, to act with moral confidence, and to live well. The STRIVE team consists of young people who have derived precisely this value from Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and seek to share that same experience with like-minded students across the globe. We do this by growing our community around a shared interest in Rand’s ideas, offer services to aid in exploring those ideas in depth, and provide the opportunity write and get published.

PHILOSOPHY

Rand described her philosophy, Objectivism, as a “philosophy for living on Earth”. In her view, each person’s life is their own, and their highest moral purpose is to live it. This means achieving a life of flourishing by rationally pursuing one’s own values. Objectivism is a system of ideas that contribute to this aim, including the role of reason in one’s life, how one can live well with integrity, and cultivate valuable relationships with others. It also stands in contrast to conventional culture, holding that capitalism is a profoundly moral system.

AYN RAND

Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982) was a novelist and philosopher. Born in Russia, she escaped the Soviet regime in 1926 by using a visa to visit relatives in Chicago. She soon pursued her ambitions of a writing career, and traveled to Hollywood to study screenwriting. In 1936, she published her first novel, We The Living, and went on to publish the national bestsellers, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. It was in her final novel that she fully articulated the scope of her philosophy, and spent the remainder of her life advocating for principles of reason and individualism.